LOOKING TO IMPROVE your physical and financial health? You might have heard similar sounding advice: All you have to do is burn more calories than you consume—and to spend less than you make.

While there’s an element of truth to both platitudes, I don’t find either helpful. There’s a psychological canyon between such abstract ideas and putting them into practice.
One thing experience has taught me: If I’m authentically stirred to want to do something,

WHEN I WAS IN THE Navy, the checklist was a way of life. Everything from a radiation leak to starting an air compressor required one. In emergency situations like flooding, you were expected to take memorized “immediate actions,” and then use a checklist to ensure all the actions were accomplished. For more routine procedures, you would follow the checklist line by line—deviations were not allowed.
While this wasn’t conducive to a creative working environment,

I ENJOY WATCHING superhero shows. It feels good to see the hero swoop in and save the day. Truth is, however, I also get a bit annoyed, as there are always some citizens who seem to ignore imminent danger. They sometimes just stare at it coming, doing nothing to get out of harm’s way.
It’s almost like they just count on the hero saving the day, and that’s a bad strategy. Strangely, many people in real life adopt the same strategy,

I WAS SURPRISED to realize the other day that, despite the varied topics HumbleDollar has addressed, I couldn’t recall a single mention of Sun-Tzu, the 6th century B.C. military commander who purportedly wrote The Art of War. The book is a favorite read of business schools. Even a cursory search on Amazon shows how often Sun-Tzu and The Art of War are invoked regarding business, finance and investing.

DOES IT MAKE SENSE to heed the advice of experts? This doesn’t seem like a hard question. I certainly listen to my doctor and to many others with specialized expertise. As a society, we all rely on experts—from civil engineers to airline pilots to firefighters—for our health and safety.
At the same time, however, human judgment seems to be riddled with flaws. Consider these examples:

After reading his senior thesis, Michael Lewis’s advisor at Princeton University gave him this advice: Whatever you do,

WE RETIRED AND MOVED to Spain in 2018. We were excited and eager to explore our new home and a new culture. We traveled a lot, mostly in Spain, but also the rest of Europe and Asia. But since the pandemic started, our travel has been limited.

Indeed, COVID-19 sped our return to Dallas. I’m happy that we’re now closer to our sons, and can see family and friends in person. But having lived in Dallas for 28 years,

CLUTTER IS DEFINED as “things lying in heaps or crowded confusion.” Its origin as a word dates to the 1570s. More than four centuries later, you might imagine we would have got the problem under control, but it seems not.
I had a friend in high school who lived like a monk. He had nothing on his bedroom dressers except lamps and a record player. I wish I could achieve such a pristine state in my condo.

I DEVOTE A GOOD amount of time to learning, not because I worry about cognitive decline—though that’s a worthy reason—but because I enjoy sampling a host of subjects, everything from meditation to music theories.
Before online courses became popular, my self-directed learning involved watching lecture DVDs. I later discovered many free online offerings from reputed universities, including Stanford, Harvard, Yale, MIT and Princeton.
When the pandemic forced me to spend more time at home,

MY FIRST RESOLUTION for 2022 is to clean up my investment portfolio. While my garage and my closets are in good order, I shudder when I review my brokerage account.
Over the years, I’ve accumulated close to 20 mutual funds and exchange-traded funds. Overall, I’ve done well with these investments—most of which are based on stock market indexes—but it’s an unnecessary hodge-podge. By the end of the year, I plan to sell a majority of these positions and consolidate the proceeds in a target-date fund.

WHEN I WAS WORKING fulltime, my 401(k) and health savings account contributions were automatically pulled from my biweekly paycheck and dumped into the respective accounts. But when I left the nine-to-five world a year ago, the onus fell on me to invest the profits from my small business. I sent off money to some low-cost funds a few times during 2021, but it wasn’t as regular as it should have been.
My resolution: Make my taxable account investing more automated this year.

I DON’T MAKE TOO many New Year’s resolutions anymore. At age 70, it seems like most of the good ones are for people much younger than me—especially the ones that involve money.
That said, I did have a good New Year’s resolution involving money for the past few years. It was to wait until age 70 to claim Social Security. In return for my delay, I was rewarded with a far bigger check.
If I were a young fellow again,

THE FOUNDERS OF economics were prodigious thinkers. They tended to believe that others shared their brainpower and so would do as they did—wrinkle their brow, think deeply and make the best choices with their scarce resources.
Problem is, this isn’t how most of us operate. Instead, we take mental shortcuts. This is understandable: We’d never rise from the breakfast table to begin our day if we rigorously analyzed the health effects of eggs, orange juice and coffee.

FOR AS LONG AS I CAN remember, I’ve been a worrier. I’ve spent too much time fretting about any number of things. I worry about money. I worry about my health. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say there are times when I worry about not having enough to worry about.
As I get closer to retirement, I’ve resolved to limit how much time I spend worrying about the future. I’ve come to realize many of the decisions that have kept me up at night are things I have little control over.

THERE’S A PARABLE that I don’t claim to have authored, but which I think about at the beginning of each year.
A man became justifiably upset when he realized his home had been invaded by crocodiles. He wasn’t sure where they came from, but they were there, lurking and menacing him.
He went to a local store to ask for a solution. The salesman enthusiastically proffered his answer: kittens. Kittens are cute, their purr is soothing and,